Backwater

by Joan Bauer

  “Is she all right?” I screamed, looking at Jo’s unmoving body and the somber faces of the rangers. “Is she going to be all right?

  19

  Sound of a motor.

  Something moving me.

  Blankets everywhere.

  Someone rubs my hands.

  I heard, “Can you hear me?”

  I can. I can’t.

  I’m crying. Hands lift me out, put me on a rolling bed, push me through doors. “Exhaustion,” a woman’s voice says. “Over-exposure,” says another. The lights are so bright. I close my eyes.

  Someone takes my hand.

  “Ivy, I’m Dr. Hillerman. You’re in the hospital. Can you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re going to put your hands in this lukewarm water to help them thaw out. You passed out back at the ranger station. You’re going to be all right.”

  Warm blankets are piled on me.

  So good to be warm, not moving.

  * * *

  I woke up the next morning when I heard my father’s voice.

  Dad was standing next to my hospital bed, his face gray as a tomb. Jack and Mountain Mama stood next to him.

  A nurse said, “Well, it’s about time you woke up.”

  I tried sitting up. “Careful now.” The nurse pointed to the IV taped to my left hand.

  “Is Jo all right?” I croaked out.

  “We’re waiting to hear on that,” Dad said.

  “She’s still alive?”

  Dad’s voice cracked. “So far.”

  A nurse took my blood pressure and said it was a miracle we had made it.

  I drank four mugs of mediocre hot chocolate.

  A doctor came in the room. She looked in my eyes with a light. I followed her finger with my eyes—up, down, left, right.

  She took my hand. “Squeeze as tight as you can.”

  I did.

  She smiled. “Don’t break my fingers please.”

  “Sorry. Do you know about my aunt?”

  The doctor sat on the bed.

  “Your aunt is hemorrhaging internally around her broken thigh bone, Ivy. She’d reached a dangerous stage of hypothermia so that her body temperature was chilled to the core. Either one can be fatal. Right now we just have to do the best we can for her and wait.”

  The doctor said I was doing well, but I had to stay another night for observation. I should be able to leave in the morning.

  Mountain Mama said the color was coming back to my face.

  Jack said my eyes looked brighter.

  Dad said he should never have let me go.

  “But I found her, Dad.”

  He nodded grimly.

  “We talked about so many important things.”

  Mama looked at Dad. “Your daughter did you proud, Mr. Breedlove. She’s got wilderness in her through and through.”

  Dad grumbled something and stared straight ahead.

  We waited for news about Jo.

  “Still touch and go,” said a nurse.

  “Still unconscious,” said another.

  I prayed as hard as I’ve ever prayed in my life.

  And then from the north and the south and the west and the east, a great company of Breedloves poured into the hospital.

  Tib came, and Egan and Fiona and Uncle Archie.

  Cousins filled the hallways and elbowed into my room like a pushy mob.

  They were arguing with the doctors who were caring for Jo.

  They were arguing with the nurses who they thought should be taking better care of me.

  Fiona accosted the head nurse on my floor when I didn’t get my medicine at four P.M. and stalked her every four hours until she brought it in on time.

  “Who are all these people?” the doctor asked me, pushing through the morass to get inside my room.

  I looked at the smiling worried faces surrounding my bed and said, “My family. We’re pretty close.”

  “I guess so,” said the doctor, checking my chart.

  And that same evening when Josephine Breedlove woke up, it was said that she did it by the sheer force of the legal profession. The first thing she saw was Dad standing there, hat in hand by her bed, like a giant tree. When the nurse came in and told Dad that Jo couldn’t have any visitors, Dad said something in lawyer to her and didn’t budge.

  “You always were the difficult one,” Dad said to Jo, grinning while he did it.

  “You haven’t changed, Dan,” Jo said back, but she took his hand when she said it.

  When the announcement was made in the visitors lounge, thunderous applause followed and the swarm of Breedloves pushed into the corridor like shoppers at a close-out sale. It was so loud that the night nurse came in and asked everyone to please keep it down, there were other patients who needed their rest.

  Archie came over and hugged me hard. “If you hadn’t gone up there, Ivy, she wouldn’t have made it. You know that.”

  I thanked him for saying it.

  Fiona took my hand and said that even though her video was completed, the rest of the family history was just beginning.

  “It’s up to you, Ivy, to write it all down.”

  I smiled weakly.

  “Just remember the limited human attention span.”

  Egan put his hand over my mouth. I didn’t scream until she’d left the room.

  * * *

  “Well, Breedlove, the trail has ended.”

  I wasn’t supposed to be out of bed, but the night nurse said I could walk Mountain Mama to the hospital elevator. I was wearing my LL Bean arctic parka that hit right above my bare knees. Hospital gowns aren’t fit for public appearances.

  I looked at my NO YIELD button and I said I didn’t know if I’d ever learned more in a week than I had with her.

  Mountain Mama said it was doubtful anyone had.

  She said she was headed back home to begin her first draft.

  “I want to thank you for rescuing us,” I said, reaching out my hand. “Jo and I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.”

  She shook my hand and tossed back her hair that was grayer from the experience. “You rescued yourself, Breedlove. I just called out a few last minute plays.”

  “If you hadn’t been there, Mama …”

  “I told you, I haven’t lost one yet.”

  “I’ve never been part of a how-to book before.”

  “Life is like a how-to book, Breedlove—you take it one chapter at a time.”

  “I’ve never thought of it that way.”

  “Neither have I. I think I’ll put that in the introduction.”

  She took out her small notepad and jotted it down.

  I said she’d made it possible for all this to happen, but this was a woman who only took credit in print.

  “You did the work, Breedlove. I just knew the terrain. Time to update yourself and embrace chapter fourteen—Now That the Wilderness Is in You, You’ll Never Be the Same.”

  “I will, Mama, I promise.”

  She slapped me on the back, marched into the elevator, and said I could be one of the great ones.

  My fall was broken by a male nurse pushing an empty wheelchair.

  He took pity on me and wheeled me back to my room.

  20

  Jo had to have surgery to set her broken thigh bone and stayed in the hospital for three full weeks. She developed a staph infection and was running a fever that didn’t want to break. Her thigh had steel pins in it, her cast was very large, she was weak and drawn, but all she could think about were her birds and Malachi and getting back home to rebuild her cabin. Jack organized the students at his college to make regular feeding rounds at Backwater. The sick birds from the hospital were taken to a nearby veterinarian, Malachi stayed with a local ranger and his wife, but Jo wasn’t convinced they were getting the care they needed.

  The family took turns visiting her on a round-the-clock vigil organized by Fiona, who got everyone’s schedule down and coordinated a “Josephine Visiting Timetable”
lickety-split. I kept reminding everyone that Josephine’s true self needed solitude, but to Breedloves the need for solitude is something to get over, like strep throat. I tried mentioning that we needed to approach Josephine slowly and sensitively because people become hermits for a reason.

  But the crowds pushed into her room and I could see her deteriorating inside, playing Scrabble, playing hearts. Her eyes looked more hunted than when we had been on the frozen lake. Any sensitive person could see that this woman wanted to play solitaire.

  Jack said it was like watching a wild bird who’d been caged and would never be content until it was set free.

  I sighed deeply. He was a poet.

  I went up every weekend to visit Jo and see Jack, working on the family history up and back on the train. I had lost my interview tapes when the cabin was destroyed, but bit by bit I got Jo’s reminiscences on tape again. My schedule was hard on Genghis (we always spent weekends together), but Jo’s memories put the last piece in the puzzle, and he had to make the sacrifice for this and future generations.

  I wrote like a historian on fire, connecting the dots.

  When you’ve personally lunged shrieking from the jaws of death, you understand the things that truly matter, the things that have lasting significance.

  Jack Lowden was one of them.

  On this vast subject, I was becoming an enthusiastic expert. He was, in short, the greatest male I had ever met. He said that meeting me had taught him that he really was a ranger deep inside. He got extra credit for rescuing me and Jo, and because there were two of us, his grade point average soared to a B-minus. I thought he should get extra credit for wolf discernment, but he said that understanding wild animals of the far north was a benefit of acing the course.

  It was hard being crazy about a person who lived five hours away. Octavia said Jack was “pitifully G.U.” (geographically undesirable), but she changed her tune fast when I showed her his picture, standing in front of a mountain with a frame pack on his back looking like something out of Outside magazine.

  Octavia held the photo to the light and whispered, “Five hours is nothing, Ivy.”

  Dad and I visited Josephine the day she was going to check out of the hospital. Dad was all worried because for the rest of her recuperation, she was going to stay with a friend of hers who lived outside of town. Dad felt she should come home with us for as long as she liked, and she looked at him and said that was the sweetest thing he’d ever said to her, but both he and she knew it would never work.

  “It could …” Dad began. “I’d rather not have to worry.”

  “Then don’t.” Jo looked straight at his stiff chin. “Don’t worry about me, Dan, I’m fine.”

  “You were near dead a few weeks ago.”

  “That was then. This is now.”

  “I do not understand the lure of that cabin, Jo.”

  “Would you like to understand?” she asked.

  He took in a stream of air and said nothing. What neither of them realized was that I had just come from the cafeteria and was at the hospital room door, listening.

  “Let me try to explain it to you. And this time, Dan, just listen.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Do you remember when we were kids and I used to hide when company came and Mom sent you to find me up in the attic?”

  “I remember.”

  “Do you know why that was?”

  “I assumed you were just trying to get attention.”

  “I was trying to avoid it. I don’t like loud, boisterous shouting. I don’t feel like myself when I’m in a room with lots of people. I didn’t make myself this way; it isn’t some freak of nature that forgot to wire certain things together. I’m not like you, Dan.”

  “I never expected you to be like me,” he said with irritation.

  “You didn’t mean to, but you did.”

  Jo sat on her hospital bed and looked out the window. “Dan, there are so many personalities in this world. So many people have different ways of being. I think you haven’t meant to do it, no one has, but except for Tib, no one allowed me to be different from the family. I don’t know if my personality scared people, or angered them, but it was clear that the measure of a Breedlove was how much they were like other Breedloves and could play the game. I didn’t qualify on either of those fronts, and without meaning to, people cut me off. The family did to me what Dad used to do to you.”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “Yes, it is. When you had so much trouble in school, Dad never gave you a break because you focused differently than Archie. He pushed you, Dan; he forced you to be tough, he insisted you be the kind of student that Archie was, and when you weren’t, he cut you off.”

  I stepped back. Dad had a focus problem?

  “He did it for my own good!” Dad shouted.

  “Did he? I remember you up till three in the morning studying because it took you longer to do it. I remember Dad not even talking to you at dinner when you got average grades. Things didn’t come easily to you like they did to Archie, but Dad always saw that as some moral failing instead of the fact that you were just different. You needed a different approach. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  I stepped back, shocked.

  “Dan, I watched your personality get harder and harder trying to catch Archie. Was it worth it?”

  Dad lifted his arms in surrender and sat on the beige vinyl hospital chair. I closed my eyes, trying not to cry.

  “Do you know what my cabin means to me, Dan? It’s the most authentic thing I’ve ever created. But it isn’t the building of it that means the most, it’s what it represents. And now it’s gone, but I don’t need things like I used to. I do need great periods of time to be alone. Please understand, I’m not asking you to change. You have great strength; you pull that from the law and being with other people. Your personality is chiseled by force. I respect that in you more than I can say. But you have to let me be genuine. I cannot be in a situation that tries to tear that from me repeatedly. And my sense is that Ivy can’t either.”

  I leaned against the door. I had never heard truer words spoken. I wanted to walk in and say she was right, but all I could do was stay there and feel.

  Dad said, “I have never meant to take anything from you, Josephine.”

  “I know you haven’t,” she said. “Believe me.”

  “I am so sorry.”

  I wasn’t sure if I’d ever heard my father apologize.

  I was stunned.

  I stood in the doorway now, tears in my eyes, looking at my father slumped in the chair.

  “I forgive you, Dan. I forgave you long ago.”

  And now I cleared my throat and they looked up at me. Dad’s face was etched in pain. Jo’s face shone.

  “Dad, I need to tell you—I’m not trying to gang up on you here—but I’ve felt the same way.”

  “I wish,” he said, “someone had told me sooner.”

  At first I was angry at that. It was plain impossible to tell him anything he didn’t want to hear. Dad climbed into a tank and rolled over people. But Jo was looking at me in a way that made what had gone on before not matter.

  “She’s telling you now, Dan.”

  I had not realized how quickly a lawyer could change gears, even though I’d seen my father do it plenty of times when he was debating against Archie. He looked up, but there was a softness about him now, like the carving of him as a little boy, gone off to find a fish.

  He reached for my hand. “Tell me now, Ivy, what do we need to do?”

  I hadn’t expected this part.

  “Well …” I said, unsure.

  “Tell me what to do.” Dad leaned forward, ready. He was a man of action.

  I could have said any number of things.

  I want you to see me for who I really am, Dad.

  I want you to stop pushing at me so hard.

  But at this moment, I decided to say, “I want to be able to talk to you about Mom.”


  He took an enormous breath.

  “And I want you to accept the fact that I don’t want to go to law school. I know you want me to. I know Grandpa wanted me to. But I promise you, I would make the worst lawyer in the history of the profession and bring utter disgrace on the family name.”

  Dad stiffened, nodded. The truth pushed upward from his ears to his cranium.

  “I suppose,” he said finally, “there are worse things than not becoming …” he struggled briefly, “… a lawyer.”

  Embracing my new wilderness maturity, I decided not to ask him what those things were.

  * * *

  When I settled back in school, it was clear I was a different person and I wrestled with the frustration only known to the profoundly mature who are forced to live among the childish.

  I tried mentioning this to Egan, who said that other than my severe case of chapped lips, I looked exactly the same.

  I briefly ran it by Octavia, who had scratched out a list of her most significant life moments that she could use in her college entrance essay and was not feeling gracious. “You, Ivy, have a life-changing adventure to write about. All I have are paltry, unrelated incidents. If I begin with the time that rock-and-roll band helped me change a tire on the Interstate, there is no reasonable transition to when Snooks, my hamster, died.”

  G. Preston Roblick had buried the story of Thickman Memorial Stadium deep in the recesses of administrative deception. But when a person has brushed against death, saved another human being, befriended a carnivore, and made lasting peace with a lawyer, a little thing like a dark prep school secret isn’t going to stop her.

  I stood before G. Preston Roblick in his paneled office and read passionately from my closing paragraph of the one-hundred-year history of the school.

  “So we can learn greatly from this part of our history because the spirit of history must always be rooted in the reporting of truth. We all, as human beings, have parts in our lives that are not right, parts that we would like to hide from public view. Perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned from Thickman Memorial Stadium is that when grave mistakes in life are made, we must use all of our resources to face them and right them. The building of an auditorium cannot bring back a football championship, but it is a shining memorial to forgiveness, accountability, and the power of redemption. It is in accepting all our history that we move forward with pride and acceptance to embark upon Long Wharf Academy’s next hundred years.”